Rick Holmes: Habitat of the Gerrymander

Monday

Mar 1, 2010 at 12:01 AMMar 1, 2010 at 1:17 AM

The practical effect of the redistricting process is to make incumbents even more entrenched, to marginalize the power of voters who don't support the majority party and to elect lawmakers more representative of their parties' extremes than of the broad center of the electorate. Nowhere is this more true than here in Massachusetts, where the Gerrymander was born.

Rick Holmes

In the next few weeks, Census questionnaires will begin arriving in our mailboxes, to be followed, where necessary, by Census workers knocking on our doors. They will collect a lot of data to be used in various government programs and shared with anyone who wants up-to-date information on how we live.

The idea, the Census marketing campaign tells us, is to take a snapshot of America.

But the real point of the Census predates snapshots and has nothing to do with counting how many households have inside plumbing. The Founding Fathers put the decennial Census in the Constitution as a way to ensure that legislative districts held the same number of people, no matter how the population shifts over time. By adjusting district lines every 10 years, the Founders figured, the political playing field would be level, every voter would have equal weight, and elected representatives would be truly representative of the people.

Which is pretty ironic, when you think about it. The practical effect of the redistricting process is to make incumbents even more entrenched, to marginalize the power of voters who don't support the majority party and to elect lawmakers more representative of their parties' extremes than of the broad center of the electorate.

Nowhere is this more true than here in Massachusetts, where the Gerrymander was born. Working from the 1810 Census, Jeffersonian Republicans in the Legislature drew up districts designed to minimize the power of the Federalists, a bill reluctantly signed by Gov. Elbridge Gerry. One salamander-shaped district inspired a cartoon in a Boston newspaper labeling it the "Gerry-Mander," and one of the young republic's most brazen political maneuvers had a name.

Political traditions die hard in Massachusetts, as evidenced by the most recent map of congressional districts. The districts snake across the landscape, their shapes governed by the desire of incumbent Democrats to have enough friendly voters in their districts to ensure they will face no strong competition. It's no coincidence that five of the state's 10 Congress members can ride the T from their homes to Beacon Hill, with Democrat-rich urban neighborhoods more than offsetting Republican votes in the suburbs.

The strategy has worked: Since the new district map went into effect in 2002, no Bay State rep has faced a competitive race.

Political agendas come into play in drawing the map of state legislative districts as well. Using ever more sophisticated computer programs, the House Speaker and whoever he names to chair the redistricting committee plug in voting patterns, the home addresses of incumbents and potential opponents, along with a few other factors, and draw the districts to suit the politics.

"Power politics is always about rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies," says Pam Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, who has pushed redistricting reform for years.

Last time around, former House Speaker Tom Finneran exercised that power with a vengeance. Republicans were further marginalized, with their strongest precincts moved into someone else's district. Democrats he considered disloyal were pitted against each other in redrawn districts.

That redistricting exercise, along with his own arrogance, eventually led to Finneran's downfall. A group representing minority voters in Boston sued in federal court, charging the new districts illegally favored white incumbents. Called as a witness, Finneran gratuitously denied having anything to do with redistricting decisions, a statement so hard to believe this is Massachusetts, after all that the judges questioned it in a footnote. Finneran was charged with perjury for the statement, and later pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice.

The best way to fix this problem is to put redistricting into the hands of an independent commission, one that is prohibited from using political criteria in drawing district lines. Common Cause pushed one such proposal in 2005, but fell 6,000 signatures short of the 66,000 it would have taken to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot.

State Sen. Richard Moore, D-Uxbridge, has proposed an amendment by legislation establishing an independent redistricting commission, but it's going nowhere. Again last week, a Constitutional Convention recessed without taking up Moore's amendment. At this point, it's too late to get it approved in time for the redistricting that will come from this year's Census.

Entrenched power will always protect its perks, so redistricting reform requires strong, persistent leadership. It hasn't gotten any here. As a candidate, Deval Patrick said he enthusiastically supported redistricting reform (as did Mitt Romney and Christy Mihos, among others). But when the reform amendment came up for a hearing, Patrick didn't even bother to testify.

In California, it's been a different story. There, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger took up the cause, proposing an independent commission that was opposed by the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties. But political change is hard, especially in areas most voters pay little attention to.

"Five times we tried redistricting," Schwarzenegger said on ABC This Week last Sunday. "And the fifth time, we won it."

So in California, the data the Census workers collect this year will be used next year by an independent commission to design legislative districts based on delivering the best representation for voters, not delivering the most friendly voters to representatives.

Meanwhile, the political bosses of Massachusetts will celebrate the 200th birthday of the Gerrymander by delivering more of the same.

Rick Holmes, opinion editor of the MetroWest Daily News, blogs at Holmes & Co. (http://blogs.townonline.com/holmesandco). He can be reached at rholmes@cnc.com.